RE: T.A.C. (Prologue - A Gathering of Ants)
by Napalm
Summary: Two of the RE factions run into each other in the tropics and try to contact the others back home. Meanwhile, plots are hatched and someone is unceremoniously yanked back from the grave.


**Disclaimer:** Ah, it's been so long since I had to write one of these things. God bless Capcom for all of the oodles of zombie-killing goodness they've given us. Characters, locations, and premise are copyrighted to them, and I earn zilch for this. Really. God, I need money.

**Author's Notes:** PG-13. Contains spoilers from about every RE game in existence (uh, or until Code: Veronica). Wasn't fortunate enough to play them all, so if there're any glaring errors in this manuscript, I'm pleading the fifth (I am, however, irrationally obsessed with accuracy, so if I did commit some horrifying blight to the REverse, then please inform me nicely; I swear they weren't deliberate!). I did consult the ultra-spiffy and ultra-detailed RE plot synopsis by Dan Birlew and Thomas Wilde, however. Very informative stuff.

Resident Evil: The Anteros Contract  
Prologue - A Gathering of Ants

_"Out of the eater came something to eat;  
Out of the strong came something sweet."_

—Judges 14:14

* * *

As a general rule, he didn't mind things with more than four legs. 

In fact, he was pretty magnanimous in his view of anthropods and their kin. Even after a pants-crapping, nightmare-inducing encounter with some of their mutated counterparts, he was still tolerant of their kind, even though he didn't think he was going to be able to look at an arachnid the same way again. 

But on his third day in this ramshackle mockery of a motel, he was this close to declaring all-out war on the insect kingdom. 

His room was overrun with roaches, but so far he'd seen more dead than alive. There was one on the platform near the air conditioner's controls, another in the sink, and a whole orgy of the lifeless little bastards under his bed. His prognoses on the corpses were straightforward enough: the hordes underneath his bed were bug-poison casualties, the one in the sink a drowning victim, and the one in the air conditioner had somehow gotten overly up close and personal with the inside fan. 

There was also an unhealthy abundance of flies swarming outside the balcony and the windows. It had been practically impossible for him to concentrate on fixing the battered laptop he'd managed to save from the chopper before it had gone down. Finally, exasperated, he'd bought a ream of fly paper and hung the strips all over the room, making sure that they were well out of the children's reach. 

Damn, this heat was sweltering. He reflexively reached for the knobs on the AC, stopping just as he spotted the dead roach that was still on the control platform. Its serrated legs were sticking up rather pathetically, wings and thorax shredded from its deadly liaison with the fan blades. There was a shattered egg case near it, its contents leaking out in a milky goo. 

He grimaced, pinched the lacerated antenna between his index finger and thumb, and unceremoniously flicked the thing into the rattan basket that served as the trash bin. 

Hell, he'd done worse things. 

Next stop was the fetid bathroom to wash his hands—after the roach in the sink had joined its equally unfortunate cousin in the trash, naturally—and upon emerging back out, he remembered the kids; they had been playing out in the hallway for more than ten minutes. He'd been hard-pressed to leave them alone for one minute, much less ten—what with the threat of Umbrella still hovering over their collective heads—but the room was _so_ goddamn small, and stifling, and there were so _many_ goddamn roaches and flies... 

The outside corridor was empty, and when his calls went unanswered, he raced down the dilapidated stairwell to the first floor where the restaurant was. 

It was even hotter downstairs, and after elbowing his way through the sweaty throngs of customers, he finally located his two young charges clustered around a table. 

"Lott! Lily!" 

There were matching expressions of guilt stamped on the children's faces as they whirled around. He jogged up to them, more relieved than angry, and laid a reproachful hand on the back of each child's damp shirt collar. 

"Look, when I said you two could play outside for a while, I thought you understood that you were going to stay in that hallway so I could at least be within earshot! Do you have any idea how sick with worry I was?" 

"We're sorry," mumbled Lily, and he saw that she and her brother were both clutching half-eaten king-size Snickers bars in their hands. 

"Where did you—" 

A female voice interrupted him, soft and apologetic. "Actually, I gave them those. I'm sorry; they just seemed hungry and I thought that maybe they'd like some good old American chocolate..." 

He lifted his head and appraised the speaker, who turned out to be a rather attractive young American woman with short, sleek brown locks and calm blue eyes. She was dressed in a turquoise tank top and white capri pants, and seated on either side of her at the restaurant table were two amused-looking men. 

There was a tickle in the back of his mind as he intensified his scrutiny of the woman. She seemed familiar, for a reason that eluded him at this point. 

One of the men, sporting bronze skin and thick dark-brown hair, cleared his throat. "There a reason why you're staring at her like you're gonna propose?" he drawled, his words laced with a distinct Spanish patois. 

"Knock it off, Carlos." This came from the individual at the young woman's left, a husky, significantly older man with a reddish beard and wearing a checkered polo shirt and corduroys. "The guy's just come to get his kids, that's all." 

"They're not my—" He trailed off, feeling a pinch of embarrassment at being mistaken for Lott and Lily's father. Surely he didn't look _that _old. "I—I didn't mean to stare, but I've seen you before...you're Jill Valentine, aren't you?" 

It was an innocently phrased question, but from the way the trio tensed and sudden loss of gaiety in the atmosphere, he might as well have dropped a bomb on the soy sauce-stained tablecloth. 

Jill narrowed her eyes. "Who wants to know?" 

Without waiting for the reply, her bearded companion plunged in, pitching his voice low so that it was inaudible to the mobs of waiters and restaurant patrons milling about: "You working for Umbrella?" 

"Not even if they flayed me raw and tied me to an anthill. You're Barry Burton, right? I read your dossiers in preparation for a trip I was asked to take to Sheena Island—" 

"The Sheena Island base?" cut in Jill. "There was mention of that in one of the files—that island's supposed to be harboring a major bioweapons production facility..." 

He nodded curtly. "Yeah. That. It's gone now." 

The as-yet unidentified man on Jill's right regarded him incredulously. "You mean to say to me you blew it up? By yourself? How?" 

"Long story." He peered at him, rifling through his brain's mental repository. "Hey, are you a S.T.A.R.S. member? I can't recognize you; were you even on Umbrella's most-wanted list?" 

His only response was an irked look from the brown-haired man, while Barry dissolved into hearty chuckles. 

Jill shot them both pacifying glances, then touched her unnamed companion's sleeve. "This's Carlos Oliviera. Ex-U.B.C.S. member. I guess you could call him a last-minute addition to the S.T.A.R.S." 

"Yeah, and next time I get a shot at those _bastardos_, believe me, I'm gonna be _numbero uno_ on their little hit list, just you wait," huffed Carlos. He appeared pleased, however, at Jill's introduction of him. 

Lott crinkled the now-empty Snickers wrapper in his hand, steering the adults' attention once more toward him and his sister. 

A shadow danced across Jill's countenance as she took in the kids. Then she raised her head and somberly met his eyes. "Umbrella?" she whispered, which translated roughly to: _They're Umbrella orphans, aren't they?_

"Yeah." He did not think that needed any elaborating—not right now, at least. Lily was yawning, her mouth still sticky with chocolate, and he scooped her up, taking an equally sleepy-looking Lott's hand. 

Barry studied the children for a minute, his profile one of grave pensiveness, and then stood up, as though coming to a decision. "You know, I think we oughta continue this somewhere else," he declared. "Preferably somewhere more private. And with an AC; this heat's taking away my appetite." 

His two friends followed suit. Carlos wiped his hands over his black slacks, scowling at the humidity. 

"We've got a room. Top floor." 

They started off, but Jill hung back and generously tucked some dollar bills underneath one of unused plates at their table. Thus done, she hurried over to join them. 

"Hey, you never told us your name," she commented. 

"It's Ark." He shifted the little girl from one arm to the other. "Ark Thompson." 

* * *

They put the children to bed before gathering in a semi-circle front of the AC, which was turned up full-blast. 

The roaches, predictably enough, launched into their rabid nightly migration from the room to the hallway outside, but for once they were hardly noticed by the humans. Carlos was the exception, however, and saw no qualm in grinding a couple to slime beneath his boot. Ark was too engrossed in narrating his tale and trying out his laptop to take offense at the floor being turned into a canvas for cockroach stew. 

"...didn't have any other way of getting home, and this was the nearest point of civilization we could reach. Right now we're basically stranded here until I get some funds. Ah, here we go—I'm online." Ark rubbed his hands over the keyboard, reveling in his revived connection to the online world. "So, uh, what about you guys? The S.T.A.R.S. hasn't officially disbanded, have they?" 

Jill and Barry exchanged glances. 

"I quit for a while," Jill admitted, "but I changed my mind. The team's still together. Well, more or less, but...we're still here. As long as Umbrella's around, the S.T.A.R.S. are gonna have to be around to fight them. It's as simple as that." She kicked at an oncoming roach with her mule, sending it skidding across the room and smacking smartly into the toe of Carlos' shoe. He quirked an eyebrow at her as if to say: _You trying to tell me something with this, Jill?_

"Barry, Carlos, and I just came from Vancouver," she continued, determinedly ignoring Carlos' quizzical look. "There was a tip—we managed to secure some random Umbrella documents, but aside from that we got zilch. We did learn, though, that something big's been going down at the Paris facility..." 

"Paris?" Ark was aghast. "That's where Claire was going." 

Barry got to his feet, amazed. "Claire? You mean Chris's little sister?" 

"I think so." The laptop's modem was functioning, and in no time at all Ark had managed to log on to his e-mail account. In the weeks he'd been offline, he had received only one new message in his inbox. 

"Hey, wait a minute," countered Jill. "How'd you know she was going there, Ark?" 

He clicked on the solitary message, trying to ignore that chill of foreboding slithering down his spine. The opened file that sprang up over the mail service site was brief and to the point—and he couldn't make hide nor hair of it. 

Subj: [None]  
Date: 12/28/98 8:51:59 PM  
From: LSK_911@USPD.com  
To: ArkT@vcu.gov.org

Send help. Address below.

E.W.

"Ark?" 

It was Jill; she was still waiting for a response. His mystified expression, bathed in the luminescent blue glow that emanated from the laptop monitor, made her pause, and she materialized at his side. "Ark, what's wrong?" 

He kneaded the skin above his eyeball with two fingers, gesturing at the screen with his free hand. 

Jill leaned closer, clamping her hand on his shoulder for balance as she scanned the peculiar message. In spite of himself, Ark could not help but note how good she smelled, a mixture of balsam and vanilla. 

"Any idea who this E.W. is?" she queried. 

"Not a one." 

She straightened back up. "I don't get it," she admitted. "Why would someone you don't know send you something like this?" 

Barry stopped pacing behind them. "Maybe it's Chris," he volunteered, a touch of consternation in his voice. "Maybe he had a reason to use a fake sig. He and Claire could be in some kinda trouble." 

Ark shook his head. "Someone's in trouble, all right, but I don't think it's the Redfields. Whoever sent me this"—he tapped the upper left screen, indicating the sender's address—"did so by using my contact's e-mail account." 

"Contact?" echoed Barry. 

"Yeah. Friend of mine. He's the one who sent me to Sheena Island and told me that Claire Redfield was headed to the Paris base. You could say he's been keeping tabs on things. Also, he located one of the lost S.T.A.R.S. members—your old buddy Chris." 

An expression of immense relief bloomed on Jill's face. "He found Chris?" 

"Well, that's good news, isn't it?" remarked Carlos, pushing himself away from the far wall and uncrossing his arms. Despite his words, he didn't seem very enthusiastic, and there seemed to be a edge of sarcasm to his tone. 

Jill was oblivious, however; she was once again checking the screen. "Time zone differences nonwithstanding, I'd say that this was sent some hours earlier. Look, the address's in Illinois. That's just the next state over from Raccoon." 

Ark worked his jaw, thinking fast. "And if I'm right, Chris and his sister should be on their way to the States...Jill, does Chris have an e-mail account?" 

"He does, but Barry and I haven't been able to get a reply from him." 

"Yet. I'll just chalk that up to him being distracted by his own troubles with Umbrella. In any case, he should be in the clear now, and he's nearer to Illinois than we are. Could you give me his e-mail address?" 

"Sure thing." Jill searched around for something to write on, but Carlos nonchalantly tore off a piece of peeling wallpaper and offered it to her. The disapproving glare she leveled at him for decimating hotel property was met with a sheepish grin; nevertheless, she accepted the scrap of wallpaper, produced a pen from her handbag, scribbled down the information, and handed it to Ark, who immediately copied the address onto the screen. 

"This Chris guy—he'll get to the bottom of this, right?" he muttered over the _clackety-clack_ of the laptop keys. 

"He will," vowed Jill. "You can trust him." 

Carlos emitted some sort of incoherent sound in his throat. "Yah, that Chris Redfield, he can do no wrong." 

Barry gave him an admonishing look; unlike Jill, he could tell when the younger man was being sarcastic. "You mention to Chris that we're joining him soon as we can, Ark," he said. Then he added, sympathetically: "I'm sure your friend's okay." 

"Well, the kid just better be alive." Ark went on typing, a wry smile tugging at the corners of his lips. "Back on Sheena Island, I told myself that if I ever made it out of there alive, I was gonna send him my therapy bill and then slap him silly for suckering me into this whole Umbrella experience." 

* * *

Nothing could shake the man. 

When the workers in that first viral accident had begun to eat each other, he hadn't hesitated to order the total obliteration of the still-populated area. When his researchers had presented him with day-by-day progress recordings of the mutated fruits of the company's labor, he'd watched reel after reel of mutilations, carnage, and cannibalism without batting an eye. And when confronted with the nuclear wasteland that was Raccoon City, its buildings reduced to ashes and its citizens to charred bones, he'd shrugged it off as a mere setback, something that could be overlooked and rectified. 

Presently, however, he was reviewing the reports from the past five weeks, and with each question he fired at his associate, the vein on his pallid forehead throbbed and bulged. 

The stone-cold son of a bitch looked about ready to self-combust. 

And that was why she was struggling not to laugh. 

"Sheena Island?" he roared. 

"Gone." The associate was one of his many lackeys—a supervisor, she guessed, from his arrogant stance and blustery demeanor. "Blown to the sky." 

"Antarctica?" 

"Gone the same way. I'll say one thing for them, though: they sure leave one hell of a calling card." 

_Damn straight,_ she mused, raking her gaze across the glass walls of the enormous orbicular office. The mirth that had bubbled up inside her at the Unflappable Man's rankled state promptly drained away, and she was poised again, her façade one of cool melancholy. 

"I heard that you had a chance to kill one of their number. You did not." 

The lackey's oil-slick tone wavered, but just barely. "I made an erroneous assumption. It will not happen again." 

During the following exodus in conversation, she innocently surveyed the activities below. The architecture was unique in design; the head office stood on top of the main support edifice, and its roof was lined with rows of bright florescent tubes that extended outward and down. The work sectors were placed much lower than the office and were wound around the main pillar in a circle. Their ceilings were outfitted with some transparent glass-like material, presumably so that an overseer could easily monitor lab operations from the convenience of the office above. 

So far, things seemed to be progressing without complications. The scientists went about their tasks with methodical efficiency, which was good: the last thing everyone needed was another outbreak or another renegade biogenetics genius. 

"But they can still be stopped," the lackey sputtered, shattering the quiet. "In fact, a couple of their acquaintances have already been secured." 

The skin at the back of her neck prickled at the announcement, and it took all her concentration to keep herself from spinning about in shock. Instead she squinted down, zeroing in on the scene inside one of the labs: an assemblage of tiny white-robed personnel scurrying around some indistinguishable form—the latest specimen in their neverending quest to create the perfect funny-farm refugee, no doubt. 

"They are insects," the man continued, as though his colleague had not spoken. "They should be less than nothing to us. But they have banded together, and they are now a much bigger pest. Perhaps if we divide them..." The man leaned forward on his mammoth desk, steepling his fingers. 

"What are you implying?" 

"It is about time we ended this problem. And we do happen to have a few factors we can use to our advantage." A pause, then: "Isn't that right, my dear?" 

Obviously he was not addressing the lackey this time, and so she pivoted on her heel to face him. "Yes, sir," she affirmed, and felt her belly coil in disgust. 

"Very well, then." There was a shuffling of papers. "I shall consult the others on this matter, as well as the situation we have with our so-called rival. You will be briefed afterwards on your next mission." 

"Yes, sir," she repeated. 

"You are dismissed, Commander Ginovaef. When we are in need of your service, we will contact you." 

The lackey performed a vague salute. "Yes, sir." As he strode past he tossed her a meaningful leer, and it was all she could do to keep herself from imbedding her stiletto into his crotch. 

As she was leaving, she found that she couldn't resist one more peek down at the lab personnel and their new toy. But from her vantage point high above, they still looked little more than ants, attending to their designated tasks like workers in a colony. 

* * *

Most newly dead people probably started off their afterlife by wanting to know about their celestial lodgings, but that wasn't the case with him. He was far more interested in seeing the look on his otherworldly interrogator's face once his "cause of death" was stated. 

Fighting off the excruciating effects of a horrible body-mutating virus before finally expiring in the arms of his one true love wasn't exactly a run-of-the-mill death scenario. Indeed, The Powers that Be had chosen to get all up and creative for his demise; no cookies-and-cream death for him, thank you very much, just this terribly climactic method of croaking after he'd chucked his whole superhuman-slash-freak status and succumbed to His Love Emotion. 

Still, it had been a great way to go. That whole sacrifice factor had only upped the whole emotional ante, so to speak, and for his trouble he'd managed to pass away in the weepy embrace of the girl he loved. Yes, he had gone out in high style, which was more than could be said for his fellow recently deceased neighbors. 

In retrospect, he probably couldn't have written a better screenplay for his final bow—even if he'd thought briefly about one with the autoerotic asphyxiation theory thrown in—and he was well satisfied with how it all turned out. 

Unfortunately for him, though, this whole death thing, while dramatic and profound and everything, had this one hitch to it. 

It had _horrible_ timing—skull-bashingly, teeth-gnashingly, frustratingly horribletiming—because he had died just after he had discovered a reason to live. 

The Powers That Be, he noted with a healthy amount of venom, sure had a twisted sense of humor. 

Apparently, in addition to taking sadistic pleasure in his not-quite-life, The Powers That Be also possessed a warped sense of justice: they'd somehow found it fit to toss his freshly-killed spirit ass into a joint that didn't quite resemble anything he'd been told about the afterlife. 

For one thing, it was too cold to be the Club of Beelzebub and too dark to be the Elysian Fields. Secondly, he could actually _feel_ himself sprawled on his back on some flat, hard surface, and it was making his supposedly non-corporeal bones ache like hell. By the time he'd managed to crack open his eyes—which was harder than it sounded; he felt as if his lids had been coated together with molasses and left to dry—he could safely conclude that his empyreal accommodations were far from top-notch. There was a ceiling suspended above him—abnormally high, it seemed—and it was festooned with lines of harsh florescent lighting, instead of the traditional fluffy white clouds or burning subterranean columns. 

There were two explanations to this. Either he had been condemned to some Purgatory-type place, or—and this was really stretching the boundaries of wishful thinking—The Powers That Be, in a rare moment of compassion, had drop-kicked his sorry butt back into his mortal body. 

But that was impossible, and he opened his mouth to state it out loud, perhaps to convince himself further. 

All that issued from his throat were frightening guttural noises, like a panther that couldn't decide whether to snarl or whimper, and those ended in a series of desperate gargling sounds. 

And suddenly there _was_ something clogged in his throat, something wet and viscous and rancid, and he gagged, spilling out a grease-like, dark-red liquid down the front of the white sheet that had been draped over him. 

The vile substance was still gushing from his mouth when he found out that he could not sit up. There were three-inch-thick metal shackles around his wrists and ankles—_metal shackles? _he thought in disbelief—and his torso, aside from being immobile, did not look quite...right. 

_Geezus._

A viscid bubble popped between his soiled lips as he mouthed the word, and immediately after he felt a rush of nausea. His body felt alien to him, and it wasn't just because he was still suffering from the shock of being once more in control of a physical form—his torso was cumbrous, swollen to the point of non-recognition, and there were grotesque growths poking out of his chest. Christ. And he thought he'd died _human_... 

He didn't know whether or not to be grateful that the swirling murk that had dominated his vision was clearing somewhat, because he could now see the room and most of its trappings: ominous-looking machines, and sterile surroundings typical of a hospital, or—surprise, surprise—a research laboratory. 

As though confirming his suspicions, a white-coated woman conveniently stepped into his line of vision, momentarily blocking out the glare from the ceiling lights. His eyesight was not yet fully focused, and her face was a smudge of intermingled pigments on a palette: a dab of blonde, peach, pink, blue-green, and red. He was so absorbed in trying to make out her features that his mind did not register the instrument she brandished in her hand—until she swiftly pressed it into his left arm. 

A nanosecond later he was aware of a prickling sensation on what passed for his flesh, and he realized, with a dull, dismayed clarity, that he had been injected with something. 

He tore his glassy gaze away from his arm and trained it on her, suddenly and overwhelmingly aware of the stark whiteness of the room, the brilliance of the lights, and the sickening stench that emanated from the gunk he'd thrown up. On his chest, the spikes twitched, rolled. Something—he didn't know what, maybe it was one of those _things_ he'd seen hanging off his stomach—thumped against the foot of his bed like the tail of an eager dog. 

The woman smiled; the blur that was her face had a thatch of white cutting across the peach. 

"Mister Burnside," she said. "Welcome back to the land of the semi-living."  


* * *

End of Prologue

**Closing Notes:** Yeah, yeah, I know most of you hate him, but if I wanted to complicate the plot, he needed to be resurrected somehow. Frankly, I'm not even too clear on the whole plot yet—it's been more than a year since I last embarked on the fanfic gravy train—but this baby practically wrote itself. So while this is mostly experimental, I'll try and see whether I can churn out a chapter one in the next month or so (I write slower than a three-toed sloth on tranquilizers). Anyway, hope you enjoyed this piece of random weirdness.

Next: Three from the Anti-Umbrella front are reunited (violently), three from the Quasi-Umbrella front get to know each other (maybe), and Carlos crushes more roaches while he and the others try to get home... 

...but of course, this's all still just theoretical. 


End file.
